Touch Sensitive

Lot of people born in the eighties or before will remember very different gadgets from what we commonly use today.

The wired phones, even those with rotary dials. The black and white televisions making way for their colorful next generation. Knobs to change the channels. 

The knobs and the rotary dials step aside to make way for the buttons. The buttons slowly moved from the devices to remotes based on infra red technology. The cassette players, morphing into smaller handheld walkman. Soon after cassettes left the stage to let the spotlight shine on the compact  disks. At the same time walkman decided to upgrade to CD as well. But shortly the music and the videos moved to memory cards and then directly to devices.

Every so often a development fast tracking the journey of its predecessor to move from Old to obsolete.  A big leap was "touch", the devices started being sensitive to touch and the sensitivity and control from touch has been getting finer every day. Newer devices are way more touch sensitive than what started more than 15 years ago.

Each technological development, by design, improved the comfort and day to day efficiency of tasks.

However, when you look at the impact on people, there has been a similar trend, although not noticed or related directly. 

During the rotary phone days people were tough, resilient immune to praise and criticism,  were hardworking and so on. Then came the seventies and eighties, the push button users. Strong, opinionated, ready to make a difference, eager to exert effort. People in these times didn’t like their " buttons" to be pushed the wrong way. Took some intent and effort to push those buttons and they reacted. 

The remote users developed more sensitive buttons, quick to react, indirect criticism started getting noticed in these times. 

And finally the touch sensitivity arrived. People in this time became very sophisticated, very smart, appeared informed, quick to accomplish great things. Efficient users of resources and multitaskers. At the same time becoming overly sensitive to touch. A little push or a gentle brush can result in huge impact. Each one connected to a global web through a zillion media applications, so the touch need not be physical, it can be remote from across the continents. Can’t operate without 'touch'. But with heightened sensitivity the touch needs to be precise. 

In my support, I want to mention that till about 10-12 years ago, I had never heard an elementary schooler state " my feelings are hurt. " A statement that I've heard even from preschoolers regularly these days.  In older times people were introduced to those deeper feelings much later in their lives.  

Again, it is not about a particular age group, people across the generations are becoming more 'touch sensitive' every passing day. 

While the sensitivity is increasing, sensibility seems to be on a decline. A very disturbing trend. Two trends in two wrong directions. With that heightened sensitivity and diminished sensibility, add the remote access to those over sensitive feelings through the social media apps. The apps that serve information and mis-information blended with a finesse. The AI generated media, the deepfakes and so on. The touch sensitivity has created a large size of very volatile and remote controllable population.  

Not a criticism, just an observation. 

But also a hope that some old fashioned  sensibility develops in place of excessive sensitivity to start the healing process which might be really needed.